“Lieutenant Leary,” she said. She was more surprised than angry, but not a little angry as well. “I thought I’d made my desires clear at our previous meeting. Quite apart from that, I’m more busy than you can possibly imagine!”
He was wearing the same uniform he’d had on the day before: it had a resewn seam joining the right sleeve to the bodice, a neat job but not one that had escaped Adele’s notice. Part of her wondered at the son of one of the richest men on Cinnabar wearing a repaired garment.
“I’m very sorry,” Leary said with quiet formality, “but your duties to the Elector don’t take precedence to obligations of honor between Cinnabar citizens.”
“Ah,” Adele said. “I see.”
She supposed she should have expected this. Thinking back on their interaction the previous day, it should have been obvious that it would end in a duel. That hadn’t been her intention, but . . .
That hadn’t been her conscious intention.
“There’s an empty balcony down the hall,” Leary said, nodding in the direction of the palace’s central structure. The building’s wings were relatively unadorned, boxes for the staff to work in. The central mass had a triple colonnade on the front and loggias on the second and third levels to overlook the gardens to the rear. “We can talk there.”
“All right,” Adele said. She looked around to find Vanness and tell him to take charge temporarily. Everyone in the library was staring at her, including the two carpenters. Staring at her and Leary.
“Don’t any of you have work?” she shouted. “By God that’ll change when I come back, see if it doesn’t! Carry on, damn you!”
She returned her attention to Leary. His expression hadn’t changed; it was as neutral as the surface of an oil bath. He bowed her toward the door.
“After you,” she snapped. The library was her domain. No outsider was going to patronize her here.
The third-floor halls were surfaced in hard-fired hexagonal tiles laid to form patterns in three shades of gray. The effect was nothing like as lush as the varicolored mosaics on the lower floors, but it was attractive and far more to Adele’s taste.
She’d fought a duel not long after she found herself in exile on Bryce. An Academy classmate from Trimshaw’s End, one of the most rural of the worlds of the Alliance, chose to find insult in an innocent comment of hers. He offered a challenge.
The duel should never have been permitted to go ahead, but the housemaster was lax and the dormitory monitor immature. Both Adele and the boy were outsiders; their classmates viewed the matter more as a cockfight than as a conflict between humans.
Even at the time Adele had known that she should end the farce by an apology. The boy was frightened, in over his head, and more afraid to draw back than go on.
Adele wasn’t afraid, but she’d learned of her parents’ death only two days before. She didn’t care about her responsibility for those who weren’t able to act responsibly themselves. She didn’t care very much about anything else, either.
She’d fought perhaps a thousand duels against holographic trainers at Chatsworth and in the basement of the Mundy townhouse: the Mundys were a hot-blooded lot, very punctilious about their honor. Because she was so thoroughly prepared, her strongest recollections of the real event were the ways in which it differed from what training had led her to expect.
The single-shot electromotive pistols were a set manufactured on Pleasaunce and lent by a friend of the dormitory monitor. Their long barrels threw a heavy slug at moderate velocity, whereas Adele had trained with Cinnabar-style weapons whose pinhead-sized pellets left the muzzle at the speed of a meteor.
Perhaps the barrel’s weight caused her to overcompensate when she swung onto her target. She’d aimed at the top of his breastbone; instead, she hit the boy between the eyes. The pinhead would have disintegrated, converting its slight mass to kinetic energy. The heavy projectile went on through and splashed trees twenty yards back with liquified brains.
Somebody screamed. There were at least a hundred people watching, members of the duelists’ house and friends from elsewhere in the Academy.